The stream flowed gently past the sleeping town. Only trout rising for insects come up from the marshlands and green, wet meadows dimpled its placid surface, and slow-moving eddies swirled smoothly by the banks. It was August, and the early-morning sunlight fell obliquely to the earth, dappled by the summer leaves. Charlie Addison, an old man, strolled along thinking of nothing.

If the hour was early, the weather was cloudless and mild. Dressed in cotton pants and shirtsleeves, he made his way down the gravelly path that followed the easy stream. After walking a while, he grew tired and sat on one of the benches flanking the water.

In the strange hours that Dusty thought of as neither night nor morning, a dream left her sweaty and planted a feeling in her stomach that was somewhere between dread and panic. She woke in the between spaces of dreaming and thinking. The house was a between space, too. It sighed as though trying to adjust to her father’s sizable absence.

My best friend Kyle was suffering—the girl he thought was The One left him for an unemployed sandwich artist, and two years on he still hadn’t recovered. Instead of falling into booze, women, ponies—crutches shattered folks gravitate towards—he bought a professional-grade telescope and spent evenings gazing up. So, I was surprised when I woke up for work one day, checked my phone, and found his message: four-fourteen a.m.: i met sum1.

Looking back, I see they were undeniably cool. Not for parents, but objectively, without qualification: cool. Cool in the ways of most cool people: youngish, fun, carefree, at ease in any environment, intelligent without a trace of nerdiness, fit without obsession, and attractive without the distancing effect of real beauty. They were boisterous, exuberant, playful, with a love of solecism. Even their fighting left an impression on me, appearing when it appeared right on the surface. No subtext, no resentment, just straight emotion and the freedom to express frustration and anger. It was beautiful, really, the security that allowed for such honesty. They were like foreigners to me: passionate, volatile, and fascinating. They drank wine liberally with dinner, were not opposed to an afternoon beer or before-dinner cocktail. The house was always full of bodies, some their family’s, some their guests’, strict distinctions of whose and whats not of high priority. The air between the two of them was charged with sex. Kids pick up on this stuff before they have language for it.

Dragons aren’t real. I know because my mother has told me so my whole life long, and everything she knows, grandmother told her.

As I grew up, I asked my mother why so many knights would brag of dragon slaying if there’s no such thing to slay. She snorted and said, “Knights! There’s a reason knights like their armour silvery-shiny. Bloody dazzlers!”

I have never forgotten this. On my 16th birthday, I received a letter. It was the first I’d ever received. I knew instantly that the wax seal on the back, glossy and dark as blood, was royal.

After the fish were gutted, the deck hosed down, and the whiskey poured, my father and his crew told me a story of a local fisherman who—after returning home from months at sea—found his wife old and withered, as if time had sped up while he was gone. I was six-years-old and curled up in my father’s lap. I learned of how a young woman who was once full of life was stripped of her beauty, her smooth skin now like sandpaper to the touch, and her emotionless eyes, black as a moonless night, stared emptily back. One by one this happened to every fisherman in town. The wives, my father said, had been replaced by demons. What was left was no longer human, and it needed to be incinerated. None of the women made a sound as their dry skin cracked and hissed in the flames.